Tweet
I am continually amazed at the furor over this salt stain under a Chicago overpass. There are a couple of reasons:
1. As I've heard a number of people note, the stain objectively looks as much like a gigantic vagina as it does the Virgin Mary,
but perhaps more importantly...
2. How do we even know that it actually looks like the Virgin Mary?
It kinda resembles some artists' interpretations of what she looked like, but let's face it -- the text of the bible was passed on orally for a few centuries before anyone even made an attempt to transcribe it, and artists' depictions of Jesus, Mary, and other people in the Bible were not, as far as I'm aware, contemporaneously created, either. In essence, this salt stain looks like people believe she might have looked. For all we know, she could look exactly like Oprah Winfrey, and her likeness has been making appearances every afternoon for the last few years...
This highlights another interesting thing, though -- artists' representations of Jesus, Mary, and other Biblical figures -- at least in this part of the world -- almost without exception depict them as lily white. Even a passing familiarity of geography, however, would suggest that they were likely olive-skinned, very dark-skinned, or (gasp!) maybe even black.
I guess the point is that people have attached heightened significance to imagery that may or may not have any actual resemblance with the actual figures they purport to represent. I'm not really a religious person myself, but if someone gets something special out of looking at something because, to borrow a quote from Pulp Fiction, "they feel the touch of God," then more power to them. To believe that something is the result of divine intervention because it looks like how someone many moons ago guessed that Mary might look, strikes me as a little silly.
With all that said, this salt stain has touched a lot of people very deeply, given their lives meaning, given them hope, etc. I can't really be too critical of that. If it makes your life better, go for it, as far as I'm concerned.
[edited to correct typo]
1. As I've heard a number of people note, the stain objectively looks as much like a gigantic vagina as it does the Virgin Mary,
but perhaps more importantly...
2. How do we even know that it actually looks like the Virgin Mary?
It kinda resembles some artists' interpretations of what she looked like, but let's face it -- the text of the bible was passed on orally for a few centuries before anyone even made an attempt to transcribe it, and artists' depictions of Jesus, Mary, and other people in the Bible were not, as far as I'm aware, contemporaneously created, either. In essence, this salt stain looks like people believe she might have looked. For all we know, she could look exactly like Oprah Winfrey, and her likeness has been making appearances every afternoon for the last few years...
This highlights another interesting thing, though -- artists' representations of Jesus, Mary, and other Biblical figures -- at least in this part of the world -- almost without exception depict them as lily white. Even a passing familiarity of geography, however, would suggest that they were likely olive-skinned, very dark-skinned, or (gasp!) maybe even black.
I guess the point is that people have attached heightened significance to imagery that may or may not have any actual resemblance with the actual figures they purport to represent. I'm not really a religious person myself, but if someone gets something special out of looking at something because, to borrow a quote from Pulp Fiction, "they feel the touch of God," then more power to them. To believe that something is the result of divine intervention because it looks like how someone many moons ago guessed that Mary might look, strikes me as a little silly.
With all that said, this salt stain has touched a lot of people very deeply, given their lives meaning, given them hope, etc. I can't really be too critical of that. If it makes your life better, go for it, as far as I'm concerned.
[edited to correct typo]
Comment